Selection Complete and the Verdict Is In...Kinda

The last post was all about how I selected the HP ENVY dv6 laptop. The question now is: Did I make the right choice? To some degree its a silly question as this isn't a comparison. I do not have two laptops side by side to compare to the road not taken. Therefore, the ENVY will be reviewed on it's own merits.

Purchasing
The ordering process is pretty simple and was done at the HP Home and Small Office store. It's easy enough to select a pre-built unit or custom to order. I obviously did the latter based on how needlessly geeky I am sometimes. It's just your typical order wizard with a next, next type process.

Hand over your credit card info and the process is underway. Now, there were a couple of oddities in the process. I did not automatically receive an order confirmation email but rather a "we received your order request, please stand by" type message. For some reason there is some sort of 24 hour processing window. I'm not sure if that's typical of all custom requests or not. However, I did receive that order confirmation email late that night with a suggested ship date of 6 days later (7 days from date of order) with about a 3 day shipment period as the unit was being assembled in China. It actually arrived a day earlier than promised which was great because I wanted to take it on a trip coming up shortly.


Receiving
The packaging was extremely efficient which is another word for minimalist. However, it certainly did the job. There was no damage to the unit whatsoever and it powered up without issue. However, a search of the box only turned up one battery. I had ordered a combination of a 6 cell and a 9 cell battery so that I'd have a spare and could run unplugged for longer. I would have to place a call into HP to get that resolved, but more on that later.

When I removed the laptop from the box, my first impression was size. As in, "Oh my, this is large." My last work laptop sported a 14" screen. Not only did it make it able to be used on cramped planes, but it was ideal for my traveling Tumi backpack. This unit with a 15.6 screen was much, much larger. Even with the added size, it wasn't overly heavy - just different enough that it gave me pause.

But I digress... The next impression was that of quality. The brushed metal top was very nice with soft touch plastic covering the wrap around hinge area. Opening up the laptop showed the nearly full sized, island style keyboard with a numeric keypad. One miss on my part - I didn't realize the arrow keys were not in the standard inverted T shape. Not a huge issue, but something I'll need to get used to. Actually, that goes for the keyboard in general. The keys are well spaced and seem to work fine, but I'll need some time to get used to the reduced key travel and spacing.

Controls
On my old work laptop I disabled the touch-pad and was using the stick controller ala the old Thinkpads but virtually no manufacturers offer that option. I dislike a touch-pad because I have large hands which sometimes brush the pad. As you'd imagine, it creates odd and sometimes unfortunate effects. Undo usually gets me past the worst of them.  Clearly, this is an issue specific to me but could matter to a select group.  I also mentioned that I had chosen the back-lit keyboard and I wanted to see how it worked. With a glance at the keyboard it seemed like it was activated by hitting the function key (fn) and then F5. But no. I searched the included manual for assistance but didn't get any hits. Jump over to the Internet and it turns out that you have to actually hit fn+space and then F5. Not intuitive.

I had never seen a laptop act this way. Well, it turns out that HP ships the laptop in a action key "enabled" mode. This allows you to activate the function key "lock" with the fn+space combination so you can use that functionality more easily. However, I happen to be one of those dinosaurs that uses the fucntion keys a great deal. Specifically, I use the F5 key to refresh web pages all the time. Needless to say, I deactivated that option right away so it would act the way I expected. Much happier now.

Setup
The laptop shipped with Windows 8 and I think that will require a post of it's own to cover. Here I'll just cover the universal items. The laptop shipped with sticky plastic covering all the shiny surfaces. Removing it was realtively easy besides the ones on the hinges. Both the packaging and the plastic meant there were no blemishes or other issues. The included battery was mostly charged so I was able to power it up right away and then start charging it later. I was slightly disappointed with the size of the power brick. It was probably about twice the size of the last laptop but thankfully light and didn't end up being any sort of burden. Depending how much I travel with this, I may look for a travel adapter from HP or APC or something.

Once plugged in and connected to the wireless network, it took the better part of an afternoon to do all the OS updates, driver updates and so on, but that's typical for any new computer and any operating system. Pretty much drama free. So far, so good and no buyers remorse. I still need to cover performance and Windows 8, but be patient that's coming soon.